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Jack comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 3: Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar? - Less Wrong
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Comments (152)
Taubes is critical of the government for failing to say or do more about sugar. You seem to take issue with the fact that he doesn't give mainstream nutrition authorities props when they don't screw something up. Yes, I suppose the FDA could have encouraged people to consume more high fructose corn syrup and good on the government for not doing that. Taubes is a polemicist. He's taking a side in a debate. He is not a rationalist-- and he is using arguments as soldiers. He's also constrained by popular science book length limit.
I'm sure the direct content of a nutritional recommendation is getting conflated with the practical effects it has on what people eat, especially in the short-form article context that you start out quoting from (why, by the way is that your jumping off point? It seems totally ill-suited as a best-version of his argument).
Wait, the American Heart Association can get away with assuming that level of sophistication in their (much more general) audience but Taubes isn't allowed to assume we know the government wasn't literally recommending people drink soda and infer that he is complaining about relative levels of emphasis-- the focus on fat over sugar?
I also worry that people who haven't read Taubes will think you're talking about a central argument of his. This entire sugar digression is basically tangential to the bulk of his critque.
Except he doesn't even acknowledge what they did say about sugar, and portrays their recommendations as a mirror image of the Atkins diet.
No. I'm taking issue with his misrepresentations of what they were saying.
Agreed. So why are you defending him?
Because in "The Correct Contrarian Cluster," Eliezer claims "Dietary scientists ignoring their own experimental evidence have killed millions and condemned hundreds of millions more to obesity with high-fructose corn syrup", and cites Taubes' 2002 article as his source.
Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I was worried about embarrassing Eliezer, but that was probably a mistake, insofar as it may have left people wondering why I was wasting my time on such an awful article. But it seemed worth addressing, insofar Eliezer apparently thought it made a good argument that crazed dietary scientists had killed millions.
Yeah, the AHA probably should have been clearer. But I'm not sure that's exactly "sophistication" they were assuming. It's stuff I've known literally since grade school. And I'm conscious of how easy it is for well-informed people to underestimate how ignorant the average person is, and I grew up with a dad for a dentist and a biochemist for a mother, and who knows, maybe my grade school did an unusually good job of nutrition education, I don't know... but on the other hand, knowing sweets aren't health food isn't rocket science. It's a message you've heard if you've seen the Food Pyramid at some point in your life.
Taubes, on the other hand, is assuming the opposite of sophistication, if expects his audience to apparently have once believed Coke was a health food.
I don't see outright misrepresentations. I see a focus on what Taubes thinks they did wrong.
Because everyone fails Less Wrong's standards for argument and discussion. Everyone here could spend 24 hours a day pointing out dark epistemology in the writings of public intellectuals and we would always have more work to do. If you're going to target a particular person it doesn't seem worthwhile unless the central content of the persons's work is wrong or dishonest-- especially with the context of a broader debate. Call it the Rationalist's Fallacy, in a world where everyone selectively emphasizes some facts to support their position someone selectively emphasizing facts that support their position provides little to no evidence about whether they are right or wrong, whether they are honest or dishonest or whether their work is net beneficial for the world.
Okay, well that makes some sense. But I sort of suspect Eliezer thought Taubes work in general made a good case that dietary scientists had killed millions and that was just the most convenient article he had when looking for cites.
Candy, sure. But there are tons of people who think yogurt with fruit(and corn syrup) on the bottom is health food. And juice. And Gatorade. I'll bet a lot of people have purchased a sugar filled cereal for their children after looking at the bottom of that food pyramid.
But what I don't get is why this confidence in the readers of the AHA pamphlet doesn't yield more charity when interpreting Taubes.
Nowhere does he say that. What he says is:
If we're assuming the reader has enough knowledge to understand that the government's recommendations have never been very high on sweets it's pretty clear that what Taubes is saying is that people end up drinking a lot of soft drinks (but this certainly applies even more to fruit juices and sports drinks) because they have been told that the primary thing they should do to avoid gaining weight is to avoid fat at all costs. Which, if not obviously true is certainly a very plausible hypothesis.
Let me put it this way: if I found distortions as bad as Taubes' in an article or book I'd previously been citing or recommending to people, I'd stop citing and recommending it.
It's not just a matter of singling out that source, but of singling out a claim. Many people complain that these posts are not representative of Taubes's work, that Taubes says little about sugar and lots of about general carbohydrates and fat. But they are representative of Eliezer, who talks only of sugar and not of fat. He makes the specific error of claiming that dietary scientists praised sugar. Going by Chris's quotes, Taubes does not make that error.
Would you mind tackling some of these questions? Please inform me if they're below your standards.
I think the point is that the mainstream nutrition is just as against refined sugar as it is fats (they are in the same area in the pyramid). Taubes actually agrees with mainstream nutrition on this, but misleads his reader into thinking the opposite. Taubes and mainstream nutrition largely AGREE, but Taubes paints himself as a contrarian. To be fair to Taubes, I think its largely a ploy to sell books (everyone wants the secret information, not the standard), and if people find it useful to absorb that message, more power to them.
As an anecdote, when I was school aged in the 80s, my public school's nurse successfully got sugar-added drinks (pop,etc) removed from the school, although the cafeteria continued to serve some very fat-heavy entrees (cheap, processed burgers and what not). I was actually saddened to learn a few years after I finished, under pressure from their vendors, the school put the vending machines and soda fountain back in the cafeteria.
All my life, the sugar message has been much more central then the "fat" message (this may be unique to me, as my parents considered pop to basically be bottled poison). Walking through the grocery store, I can find as many "low-sugar" and "sugar- free" items as I can find "low-fat" and "fat-free."
I think that a) Taubes probably wants a more aggressive anti-sugar stance than, say, the government has taken. And b) his readers aren't actually being misled-- they know what the mainstream dieting advice has been.
Sugar is one chapter in his first book and less in his second. The books' pitch has nothing at all to do with sugar: it's about the low-fat prescription.
I definitely got a pretty strong anti-sugar message but (importantly I think) it wasn't a "sugar makes you fat" message.
I think this is where you disagree with the main post (and with me). I know several people who have read Taubes that have no idea what the main stream nutrition advice is (they are steeped in paleo blogs that paint a very dismissive straw man of mainstream nutrition). Case in point: I recently won a $500 bet about whether or not refined sugar was at the base of the food pyramid.
Sure, but its the focus of this particular less wrong thread. Throughout the book, Taubes style is to present his information as outside of the mainstream when much of the time, its right in line with the mainstream.
Then what was bad about it?
So that's an interesting data point. If this is a common view among paleo/low-carb people than I would certainly agree that Taubes is to blame.
I didn't get this impression about his position on sugar from his books. Never thought he departed drastically from the mainstream in terms of advice about sugar consumption. I certainly get this impression from his view on carbohydrates more generally and anti-fat and anti-saturated fat messages( which is what the books are actually about!). If Chris or someone posts something indicating that he is misrepresenting mainstream nutrition science there I'll change my min.
It's hard to reconstruct these things, but Nornagest's comment is basically what I remember. I definitely remember thinking Popsicles were healthier than ice cream because they didn't contain fat.
Can't speak for Jack, but I remember Eighties and Nineties pop-nutrition advice associating sugar consumption (inaccurately) with hyperactivity and (more accurately, but with caveats) with tooth decay. As regards specific sugar-rich foods, I don't recall soft drinks ever being blamed for obesity during my childhood, but candy, cake, and cookies all were at times -- though this might have as much to do with fat as sugar.